Can you restart civilisation and cross the stars?
Before We Leave is a non-violent city building game set in a cozy corner of the universe. Nurture your Peeps and their surroundings while rebuilding and rediscovering civilisation. Settle new lands and planets while avoiding hungry Space Whales.
Before We Leave takes inspiration from building sim games like Civilization Revolution though there’s no warring factions for you to fight or defend yourself from, but instead you begin by simply building up your island and learn to navigate to others while eventually learning how to travel between planets and the ultimate goal is to make your residents (or Peeps as the game calls them) happy and to establish trade paths between islands and planets.
It can be overwhelming at first to see so many different tutorials thrown at you, especially if you aren’t used to games like these but if you are a veteran then it should come fairly quickly to you. Games like these are usually best suited to PCs but the interface for the PS5 version is surprisingly easy to use and navigate. I won’t lie that setting up trade routes is a bit tricky at first, but it can become simple once you’ve learned the basics here.
Learning new things like how to build certain buildings or refine materials push you a step closer to either the next island or planet and these skills are shared between all Peeps as long as a library is built in each area you wish to use the skills on. You’ll also need to feed, cloth and keeps your Peeps happy so keeping them in an area with a lot of pollution is going to disrupt things. Eventually you’ll need to learn how to supply power in greener ways to keep them happy and also to stop areas of the map becoming too polluted to build on.
It ends up feeling like a balance between science and nature as too much pollution will mess up areas’ things up, but you need to advance tech to advance to new unpolluted areas and to also develop green energy. It’s a tough balance to achieve but one that is rewarding if you can pull it off.
The visuals are simplistic but have a nice charm to them, while the framerate is mostly consistent. Load times are decent and the soundtrack isn’t too bad either.
The Verdict
Before We Leave is a decent building sim that works well with a traditional controller, something usually more suited to Mouse and Keyboard. It may be simple to veterans of the genre, but newcomers will find a lot to love here and I’m sure veterans will too.